Family Therapy Interventions (List)

This blog aims to provide you details on family therapy interventions. Family systems therapy draws on systems thinking in its perspective on the family as an enthusiastic unit.

The application of systems thinking in families reveals that the behavior of the family members is mostly informed by and not separated from the functioning of the family’s origin.

Families encountering struggle inside the unit and looking for proficient help to address it might discover family systems therapy a supportive methodology.

Before going on to the family therapy interventions, let’s have a look at the basic definition of family therapy, also recognized as family counseling.

What is Family Therapy / Family Counseling?

Family therapy is defined as the type of psychotherapy that focuses on resolving the issues within a family.

It tends to be utilized to help a family through a troublesome period, significant progress, or mental or conduct medical issues in family individuals (“Family Therapy”, 2014). 

As Dr. Michael Herkov clarifies, family therapy sees people’s issues with regards to the bigger unit: the family (2016).

The supposition of this kind of therapy is that issues can’t be effectively tended to or tackled without understanding the elements of the groups.

‘The way the family operates influences how the client’s problems formed and how they are encouraged or enabled by other members of their family.’

Family therapy can use interventions and exercises from various types of therapies including behavioral therapy, cognitive therapy, relational therapy, and so forth.

The type of therapy and interventions used in therapy depends on the kind of issue the client is facing.

Emotional or behavioral issues in adolescents are ordinary inspirations to visit a family counselor.

An adolescent’s issues don’t exist in a vacuum; they exist, and will presumably be tended to, inside the setting of the family (Herkov, 2016).

It ought to be noticed that in family therapy or guiding, the expression “family” doesn’t really mean blood family members.

In this unique situation, “family” is any individual who “plays a drawn-out steady job in one’s life, which may not mean blood relations or family individuals in a similar family” (King, 2017).

What are the Benefits of Family Therapy?

This increasingly all-encompassing strategy to deal with conflictual issues inside a family has demonstrated to be incredibly powerful much of the time.

In family therapy, families can take a shot at their issues with the direction of a family therapist in a controlled and secure environment. 

The advantages of family therapy include:

• A superior comprehension of healthy, defined boundaries and family dynamics as well as patterns
• Improved communication skills
• Improved critical thinking skills to resolve problems
• More profound compassion
• Diminished clashes and good anger management skills (10 Acre Ranch, 2017) 

All the more explicitly, family therapy can improve family connections through: 

• Uniting the family after a trauma or problem
• Making trustworthiness between family individuals
• Imparting trust and sense of support in family individuals
• Building up a steady family condition
• Diminishing causes of stress and worry inside the family
• Helping family individuals pardon one another
• Problem-solving for family individuals
• Bringing back family individuals who have been separated or left their family (American Addiction Centers, 2017) 

Family therapy improves the aptitudes required for a sound family working, including better understanding and communication, compromise, and problem-solving.

Improving these abilities likewise builds the potential for achievement in surviving and attending to family issues constructively. 

In family therapy, the attention is on furnishing all family individuals with the tools they require to speed up the process of healing(Teen Treatment Center, 2014).

Family Therapy Interventions

There is a range of counseling techniques used for family therapy including:

Structural Therapy 

Structural family therapy, the one introduced by Salvador Minuchin, is based on five key principles. The five specific principles encompass: 

• The relational therapist reflects on the relationships between persons rather than their psyches 
• “Identity Network” focused on intimate family experiences 
• Structure of a society focused on social experiences
• “Well-functioning family” based on how the family responds to family needs and develops 
• The family therapist’s role is to help the family outgrow limiting development habits and evolve as a stronger entity

Strategic Therapy

Strategic therapy is a theory that emerged from a combined number of different approaches to psychotherapy.

There are five different elements of strategic therapy. These five parts include a brief social stage, problem stage, interactional stage, goal-setting stage, and task-setting stage.

Systemic Therapy

Systemic therapy emerged from family therapy. There are many family-system treatments that relate to the modern definition of systematic therapy.

The systemic treatment has stepped away from sequential causality in recent decades and is instead addressing things when they are produced in an environment that is socially and linguistically affected.

Narrative Therapy

Narrative therapy is different because of how it enables clients to become their own entities and then use their own abilities to address the problem and reduce the tiny problems in the real world as well.

The concept of narrative therapy is that people build constructive life experiences that help them identify who they are really and what they’re doing, and have the finest resources to address their lives.

Narrative therapy aid individuals in clarifying, developing, and supporting life narrator and help in directing their journey.

Transgenerational Therapy

Transgenerational therapy gives practitioners the opportunity to learn interactions within a family over multiple generations.

Family therapist’s insights and analysis of interactions enable the individual to appreciate the main problems within the family group.

In addition to the current problems, the counselor can also collect on future struggles or difficult events.

Notions of transgenerational therapy intervention are often applied in combination with other treatments to help build a lens to frame the issue discussed during training sessions.

Communication Therapy

Communication problems emphasizing counseling is a frequent need particularly when it applies to partnership counseling and lack of contact is the aforementioned concern between the pair.

Communication issues between people may start with cultural context differences and/or personal experiences.

Specific conditions that can lead to relationship difficulties involve stress, anonymity, mental health disorders, and so forth.

Interpersonal communication problems can be resolved in various ways either for benefiting the individuals only or both the partners.

A professional therapist will help a person assess what the best communication skills and talent techniques may be.

Strategies include listening effectively, expanding contact channels, and mediating dialogue.

Psychoeducation 

Psychoeducation is considered to be the training of teaching mentally ill individuals and families to assist in empowering and maintaining them with their situation.

Psychoeducation is a strong weapon toward the day-to-day stigmatization of mental health issues and others who encounter other’s struggles.

Psychoeducation is described as having four specific objectives in mind: 

• Exchange of information
• Support through intervention and medication
• Training and self-help support 
• A safe place to wind up

Relationship Counseling

Relationships are not easy and simple issues can be the result of stress in your daily life or add strain to any relationship.

Chronic disease, lack of effective communication, cultural differences, infidelity, and mental health issues are additional problems that can contribute to stress.

Couples can also experience problems such as physical activity, mental distancing, financial challenges, and a general loss of trust.

Relationship therapy usually begins as a person attempts to determine whether they are going to sort out their differences and try to stay together or pass on.

Milan Therapy

This therapeutic technique focuses on analyzing belief systems that are harbored by individual family members or by the collective as a whole and challenges family rituals and practices especially when they relate to conflict.

By bringing focus to these implicit and involuntary belief structures, Milan counseling aims at undermining and suppressing belief systems that create discord within family dynamics.

Recommended Books

The following is a list of some of the best books on family therapy interventions.

These books are a great source of increasing knowledge about family therapy and techniques which are used in such therapy.

All of the below-mentioned books are easily accessible on the internet.

Just click the book you wish to study and you will be redirected to the page from where you can access it.

• Creative Family Therapy Techniques: Play, Art, and Expressive Activities to Engage Children in Family Sessions by Liana Lowenstein  | Sep 10, 2010
• Emotion-Focused Family Therapy: A Transdiagnostic Model for Caregiver-Focused Interventions by Adele Lafrance Ph.D., Katherine A. Henderson Ph.D., et al. | Dec 10, 2019
• The Family Therapy Treatment Planner, with DSM-5 Updates, 2nd Edition (PracticePlanners) Part of PracticePlanners (39 Books)  | by Frank M. Dattilio, Arthur E. Jongsma Jr., et al. | Dec 1, 2014
• Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy with Couples and Families: A Comprehensive Guide for Clinicians by Frank M. Dattilio and Aaron T. Beck | Oct 23, 2013
• Family Therapy: Concepts and Methods (2-downloads) by Nichols Michael P. and Davis Sean

What techniques are used in family therapy?

A number of counseling techniques are used in family therapy.

These include structural therapy, strategic therapy, narrative therapy, systemic therapy, communication therapy, psychoeducation, relationship counseling, and transgenerational therapy.

What are the 3 goals of family therapy?

Three goals of family therapy include helping family members develop good communication skills, to enable family members to identify and resolve their family problems, to help them create a better functioning at home environment.

What is intervention therapy?

An intervention therapy is a form of psychotherapy in which the therapist works for improving the wellbeing of individuals or groups basically for the people who are in need but are refusing to get therapy or are unable to accept help.

Does family therapy really work?

Family therapy can prove to be very effective while resolving the feelings or modifying the behavior of kids carefully, keeping in view their social context.

Family therapy does really work since it harnesses the power of the family to heal itself.

How does family systems therapy work?

Yes, family system therapy does work. It works on the basic principle of the emotional unit.

According to family system therapy, the behavior is both informed by and indivisible from the functioning of one’s family origin.

What are some intervention strategies?

Some intervention strategies include giving plenty of positive feedback, monitoring progress continuously, defining goals, directing instructions, getting your lecture rephrased by students, and counter check whether the kids are reflecting.

This page explained in detail the family therapy interventions.

The blog mentioned various family therapy interventions used during family counseling or family therapy.

If you have any questions or queries regarding this blog, let us know through your comments. We will be glad to assist you in this regard.

References 

What Is Family Therapy? +6 Techniques & Interventions by Courtney E. Ackerman (2020)

Types of Family Therapy – Premier Mind Institute

Family Systems Therapy – GoodTherapy

5 Family Therapy Counseling Techniques

Amazon.com 

Unsplash.com